A 3-D Printed $E$ -Plane Waveguide Magic-T Using Air-Filled Coax-to-Waveguide Transitions

This article reports on a new class of broadband and fully 3-D printed <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$E$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-plane coax-to-waveguide transition and a monolithically 3-D printed waveguide magic-T based on the transition. The transition is constructed by a section of air-filled rectangular coaxial transmission line (TL) that is placed between two broadband coax-to-waveguide probe transitions. It is used to interconnect the magic-T’s sum port and the waveguide T-junction. The incorporation of the transition reorients all the waveguide arms of the magic-T into the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$E$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-plane. Some <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$X$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-band prototypes of the proposed transition and the magic-T are designed and implemented. Polymer-based additive manufacturing and copper electroplating techniques are employed to monolithically fabricate each prototype. The transition and the magic-T exhibit broadband and low-loss characteristics from 8.2 to 12.4 GHz with the measured performance well matched with the simulations. In addition, the power handling capability (PHC), including the peak PHC (PPHC) and the average PHC (APHC), of the magic-T is evaluated by simulations, showing that the proposed magic-T could handle 100 W of APHC.

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